Effigy
by Fictatious
Summary: Ryou goes to have a talk with his shadow, and he is unnerved, as always, by Bakura's 'parents'.


Ryou arrived in his soul-room, leaving his body and the throbbing pain in his left hand behind in bed after a late-night emergency-room visit. He paid it little attention to the scene, however, before walking out into the hall and stepping across to the opposite door.

It was barred today, a heavy beam having appeared across it, and the door looked like it could have withstood a head-butt from a bull elephant. Ryou laid his hands softly against the wood. The board was much too big for him to have moved if it were a physical reality. But it wasn't a physical reality and Ryou willed it to disappear without too much effort.

The rest of the bolts and locks came loose and Ryou was soon stepping into the dark cell beyond. He let the door swing shut behind him and stood on the platform behind it, looking down into the lowered cell, where the Thief was pacing and mumbling, obvious distress on his features. Ryou steeled himself and descended the stairs that clung to the wall of the cell.

He stopped a few steps from the bottom of the stairs; he never ventured all the way down to the floor. But then, The Thief didn't actually stand on the floor either. From wall to wall, the Thief's soul-room was populated by tiny, clay figures, about the size of a man's thumb and half-buried in sand. They were lumpish and indistinct, only vaguely suggesting the shape of a human, with no identifiable limbs or features, save for two cavernous eye-holes in the head-area of each one.

They were the Thief's parents.

His real family probably existed somewhere among the throng of lilliputians, but the Thief wouldn't have been able to tell them from the others, and they wouldn't know who they were themselves. To call the people of Kul'Elna 'ghosts' would be giving them too much credit; they were nearly-anonymous, broken pieces of human souls. All things that had defined them as individuals in life having been stripped away, as all that they had been was torn apart in the violence of their slaughter.

None of them knew who exactly they were, but they all knew Thief King Bakhura; he was their legacy, their memory, their last hope, their precious child. Every fractured soul of his miniature, terracotta army considered the Thief to be their own flesh and blood.

At first, Ryou had thought it odd for the Thief to be treading upon the spirits of his 'family'. It took a while for him to understand that what he was actually witnessing was the lost souls of Kul'Elna holding their son aloft, supporting and strengthening him, lifting their progeny up and imbuing him with all the will and power they had left to them. All their hate, all their anger, all their love.

"Thief," Ryou called quietly.

The Thief whipped around to look at Ryou, apparently only just noticing his presence, having been distracted by his conversation with the pigmys. Ryou could only ever hear faint, distant whispers from the tiny figures, but the Thief could make out their words at times, though his throng apparently had a habit of always speaking in a deafening, simultaneous clamor.

"You helped him!" the Thief accused, giving Ryou a reproachful look. "You helped him and now he's taken away all our friends!"

Ryou frowned down at him. "I told you, you can't collect people who are still alive. That's why we had to move, and you promised you wouldn't do it again."

"But this is _different!_" the Thief insisted. "It's different because it was _him!_ And now he's taken all our friends and we don't have _any_ left at all!"

Ryou tilted his head slightly, not particularly surprised by the Thief's complaint, but his explanation was odd. "Who? You mean the 'Other Yuugi'? Who is he?"

"That was _Pharaoh!_" the Thief shouted furiously, as though the fact was obvious and Ryou should have known.

This new revelation was surprising, and Ryou settled down on the steps to consider it for a while. "You should have told me. How was I to recognize him?" Ryou said at last. "And you shouldn't have involved the others. They have nothing to do with it, do they?"

"They're _helping_ him!" Bakura protested.

"I'm pretty sure they don't know who he is either," Ryou pointed out. "They were nice, Thief. Don't punish them for _his_ crimes."

"I wasn't going to _hurt_ them," the Thief sulked. "They could have been our _friends_."

"But you promised you wouldn't _do_ that anymore," Ryou reminded him.

"I needed to neutralize them," the Thief said defensively. "So that they couldn't get in the way." His face crumpled into a glower. "And then _you_ got in the way!"

"And _you_ hurtme," Ryou said in a flat, cold voice, returning the glare.

The Thief looked away, guilt dampening the anger on his face. "You wouldn't stop fighting. I was just trying to fight back."

"Thief, hands are complicated," Ryou groaned. "It might never work right again. Musicians and artists can be ruined for _life_ if their hand gets injured badly."

The Thief's eyes snapped back to his, wide and alarmed suddenly. "Is it bad?" he whispered. "Did I break it forever?"

Ryou sighed and leaned against his knees. "I don't know..." he said quietly. "None of my tendons got severed. It hurts a lot, but I can still move my fingers. I don't know how well it's going to heal, but either way, it's going to take a long time."

"... I'm sorry," the Thief mumbled, his gaze near Ryou's feet. "I didn't think about it."

"I know," Ryou sighed.

There was quiet between them for a while, and Ryou could hear the faint whispers of the parents, but the Thief didn't seem to be paying attention or responding to them, so it must have just been their usual background chatter. "I found Pharaoh," the Thief said quietly after a while. "But I don't have all the keys yet..."

"So what were you even planning to do with him then?" Ryou asked irritably.

The Thief shifted uncomfortably. "Keep him until I was ready?" he hazarded.

"I don't think you'd be able to keep the Pharaoh the same way as a normal person," Ryou said, shaking his head. "You shouldn't try to keep hold of him any longer than absolutely necessary. Not at all, if you can help it."

The Thief nodded, looking scolded.

Ryou sighed. "Stay hidden for now. Pretend you're not here and I can stay close to the Pharaoh while you find the other keys."

The Thief smiled a little, meeting Ryou's eyes again. "You're a good master," he said quietly, then his face darkened a little with worry. "Be careful. I don't- we can't let him hurt you. He'll try. He hurts people."

Ryou nodded. "I know," he said softly. "I'll be careful."

The Thief smiled again and walked over to Ryou, atop the heads of his parents. He dropped his hands onto the steps and crawled up to bring his face level with Ryou's and kissed his lips gently. Ryou tilted his head into the kiss and lifted a hand to pet the Thief's hair. When they broke, the Thief eased back and sat down a few steps below Ryou, so that he could drape against Ryou's lap.

Ryou considered, for a moment, complaining about how uncomfortable his seat on the stairs -and this 'room' in general- was, but he brushed it aside. The Thief obliged to spend more than a fair amount of their shared time within Ryou's soul room; Ryou could tolerate these little visits with the Thief's parents now and then.

...

...

A/N: The image that inspired this fic is one of my favorite installation art pieces, Antony Gormley's 'Field'. He traveled all over Greece and collected the local clay in each little town where he stopped and asked locals to sculpt him quick (like, maybe 5 minutes by the look of them) statuettes of people, giving them all the same amount of clay and the same object to poke eyes with for an element of uniformity, while all the people are completely different in their lumpiness. When he finished collecting statuettes from tons of little villages around Greece, he had *thousands* of them. If you go to my livejournal, I've posted photos of 'Field' at the bottom of this fic, or if you google 'antony gormley field' you'll get lots of pictures.


End file.
